Using AI to evaluate creative designs

A design for a building or product may be considered creative by some person, group, or the general public regardless of what others might think. We survey the literature on characteristics of creative products, particularly of design. We argue that the three characteristics of novelty, value, and surprise are essential for evaluating creativity in design, although these may be augmented with other considerations that are domain dependent or based on individual interpretation. We propose that measures of distance and Bayesian probability can serve in measuring the three features of creativity, and that strategies like clustering can serve to create and organize the conceptual space against which these features are evaluated. There are at least two motivations for formalizing the assessment of creativity: to give an artificial agent an ability to judge creativity, and to give human analysts a uniform means of evaluating creativity in designs, whether the design stems from a single human, a single artificial agent, or a community of agents, human and/or artificial. We illustrate concepts using an example of sustainable design, the Bloom laptop